Today is Trinity Sunday, an appropriate end for Easter and Pentecost. While Easter is all about the risen Christ and Pentecost is all about the Holy Spirit, today is all about the triune God: Father, Son, and Spirit. We celebrate the three-in-one vision of God that is unique to Christianity.
Today’s Scripture passages include all three Persons of the Trinity, sometimes in the same passage. Let’s take a quick look:
The Old Testament reading is from Isaiah 6, the story of Isaiah’s commission, when he sees the Lord—a frightening experience, for even the seraphs who attend the Lord of hosts cover their eyes. This vision of God prompts Isaiah to realize that he is “a man of unclean lips.” But God in His mercy and grace, sends a seraph to touch Isaiah’s lips with a coal and proclaim to him the words of absolution, “your guilt has departed, your sin is blotted out,” foreshadowing the work of Christ on the cross.
Psalm 29 focuses on God’s power, and specifically on the power of God’s voice. I love this image of the voice—it hearkens back to Genesis 1, when God speaks all creation into being, and it holds Trinitarian undertones: the voice of God requires a Speaker (the Father), Breath (the Spirit) and a Word (Christ, the Son).
In Romans 8, Paul reminds us that we “did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but… a spirit of adoption.” God is our Father, and the Spirit witnesses to our spirit that we are God’s children, joint heirs with Christ who suffered for our sake that we might have life as children of Love.
And in John, we read Jesus’ famous discourse about being born of water and the Spirit. God the Father, Jesus says, so loved His creatures that He sent the Son so the world might have life through Him. We who would receive that freely offered gift of life must be “born from above.” The Spirit births this new life in us and leads us in the ways we should go, like a mother bearing and rearing her children.
The God of glory thunders.
In his temple, they all cry: “Glory!”
Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory.
The lectionary passages for Trinity Sunday:
Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm 29
Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17
